Intro: "A new academic study of 58,000 federal criminal cases has found significant disparities in sentencing for blacks and whites arrested for the same crimes. The research led to the conclusion that African-Americans' jail time was almost 60% longer than white sentences."
Researchers worked to determine why incarceration rates for African-Americans are disproportionately high. (photo: Dan Bannister/Getty Images)
11 February 12
new academic study of 58,000 federal criminal cases has found significant disparities in sentencing for blacks and whites arrested for the same crimes. The research led to the conclusion that African-Americans' jail time was almost 60% longer than white sentences.
According to M. Marit Rehavi of the University of British Columbia and Sonja B. Starr, who teaches criminal law at the University of Michigan Law School, the racial disparities can be explained “in a single prosecutorial decision: whether to file a charge carrying a mandatory minimum sentence….Black men were on average more than twice as likely to face a mandatory minimum charge as white men were, holding arrest offense as well as age and location constant.” Prosecutors are about twice as likely to impose mandatory minimums on black defendants as on white defendants.
In federal cases, black defendants faced average sentences of 60 months, while the average for white defendants was only 38 months.
The report concludes that sentence disparities “can be almost completely explained by three factors: the original arrest offense, the defendant's criminal history, and the prosecutor's initial choice of charges.”
To Learn More:
A Good Reason to Do away with Mandatory Minimums? (by Sonja Starr, Nieman Watchdog)
Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Charging and Its Sentencing Consequences (by M. Marit Rehavi and Sonja B. Starr, University of Michigan Law & Econ, Empirical Legal Studies Center Paper)
Racial Inequalities in Conviction and Sentencing (by David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
